Swann

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A family name of English origin carried by various people ; the fictional gentleman who appears in Marcel Proust's multivolume novel In Search of Lost Time
2. A hereditary surname found in English-speaking countries ; a character in Marcel Proust's long novel In Search of Lost Time, a cultivated man of high society
3. A common family name of English origin ; the name of a refined socialite character who figures in Marcel Proust's sprawling novel In Search of Lost Time

Etymology: Swann is a variant spelling of "swan," and its story is mostly one of spelling rather than meaning. The bird's name goes back to Old English "swan," which is related to words in other Germanic languages, and the same root gave the sense of the animal itself without any change in what it denoted. Forms with a double "n" were common in older English, and "swann" survives as a historical spelling of the same bird. Because it is only a variant, the word carries no separate sense of its own. Anyone meeting it in an older text, or in a surname or name where the spelling was fixed early, is reading the familiar swan under a different spelling. The name Swann, used as a family name, follows the same pattern: it is the bird's name, written in a form that stuck in some families and places.